NOTE: Moodle 4.3 (and higher) include this feature in the core release - you only need this plugin if you are using an older Moodle release.

This is a Moodle plugin which adds Multi-Factor authentication (MFA), also known as Two-factor authentication (2FA) on top of your existing chosen authentication plugins.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-factor_authentication

Why another MFA plugin for Moodle?

There are other 2FA plugins for moodle such as:

https://moodle.org/plugins/auth_a2fa

This one is different because it is NOT a Moodle authentication plugin. It leverages new API's that Catalyst specifically implemented in Moodle Core to enable plugins to augment the login process instead of replacing it. This means that this MFA plugin can be added on top of any other authentication plugin resulting in a much cleaner architecture, and it means you can compose a solution that does everything you need instead of compromising by swapping out the entire login flow.

See this tracker and the dev docs for more info:

https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-66173

https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Login_callbacks

The other major difference is that we support multiple authentication factor types as sub plugins, eg IP Range, Email, TOTP, WebAuthn / FIDO2 and in future others such as SMS or hardware tokens or anything else as new sub-plugins. They can be flexible configured so that different combinations of factors are considered enough.

Flexible configuration

The MFA has multiple sub-plugins for each type of factor. Different factors can be combined and checked in a specific order. See the plugin readme for the full details:

https://github.com/catalyst/moodle-tool_mfa/#configuration

For more information, consult the readme:

https://github.com/catalyst/moodle-tool_mfa/

Warm thanks

Thanks to Swissbit for sponsoring the work to add WebAuthn / FIDO2 support to this plugin.